Mr. Apology

by Campbell Armstrong

  Madeleine turned towards him in the dark.

  “I thought you were asleep,” he said.

  “I’ve been trying,” she answered. “I can’t quite make it.”

  Harrison said nothing.

  “I’m afraid, Harry. I really think I’m afraid.”

  He rolled towards her, putting one arm around her shoulders.

  He shut his eyes. Finding you, killing you. It seemed to him he could hear an echo of those words rumble through his head, as if they were being cried aloud by a voice trapped in a canyon. I don’t feel fear, he thought. I don’t feel what Madeleine feels. I feel drawn towards the voice, drawn towards whatever motivates it, whatever lies behind it; when I listen to it it’s almost like some kind of thread attaching me to the caller, a link of some frail, invisible sort. Who are you? he wondered. And what do you look like?

  He listened to the sound of Madeleine’s breathing as it become more and more regular, deeper. Then when he was sure she was alseep, he swung around and sat upright on the edge of the bed. He stared at the thin red light for a few seconds before he pressed REWIND. He stopped the tape. Then PLAYBACK. He turned the volume low and sat with his eyes shut, listening to the voice again. It’s kinda fun, Apology.… You and me can have some real fun together.… I really get off on the idea of finding you and killing you—because the real kicker is I can apologize for murdering you in advance.…

  Played at a low volume like this, the voice had a whispering quality, a whispering that seemed very close, close to the point where Harrison could imagine he felt hot breath against his ear, where he could imagine he smelled stale scents from a half-open mouth.

  A presence in the bedroom.

  Throughout the whole loft.

  He created a picture for himself—this caller had the kind of face he’d seen so long ago on that chain gang, a pale sunken face, eyes burning, tight lips, a faint nerve working in the hollows of the jaw. Does he look like that? Does he look like one of those convicts?

  Somebody else in the loft. Suddenly the idea spooked him.

  He switched the machine off, set it back to ANSWER. Then he got back in bed beside Madeleine.

  FOUR

  1.

  Frank Nightingale watched Moody open a carton of yogurt and stir it with a small wooden spoon. Then, when he seemed satisfied with what he saw, the Boy Wonder began to shovel the white stuff up into his mouth, making a funnel of his lips. Tiny drops slipped onto the back of his hand and lay there like cow glue. “Is that your breakfast, Doug?” he asked.

  Moody nodded. “It’s good for you. It’s filled with all kinds of B vitamins.”

  B vitamins, Nightingale thought. He shook his head and walked slowly to the window of the apartment and looked down into the street below. Sure enough, there they were, the little groups of sightseers, the morbid drawn to the sight of cop cars like suicidal moths to the core of a flame. He had the odd feeling he kept seeing the same faces over and over again, like somebody out there was selling tickets. Why were so many people out so early anyhow? It was hardly dawn. Maybe they were ghouls, the undead; maybe they slept later in the day inside their cozy coffins when the sun came up. He listened to his young partner slurp. Inside his head he could still hear the harsh sound of the telephone that had wakened him about an hour ago. A fresh killing, lieutenant. A brand new homicide.

  Moody was looking at the posters on the wall. Nightingale watched him a moment and then glanced at his own reflection in the full-length mirror. A charitable word was portly.… What could you do about your girth in this hectic world of fast-food and bad hours? He went inside the bedroom, where the victim lay. Quite a room—a large four-poster brass bed, tons of dried flowers and pussy willows sticking out of green glass vases, the walls covered with photographs of a young guy, the same young guy in every one. Nightingale stared at the figure on the bed. Then he took a closer look at the photographs. To Henry from Carlos, Buenos Aires, 1945. To Henry from his best friend Carlos, Resistencia, 1946. An old love, an antique obsession, a ghost from the past. He opened a closet. There was a pile of leotards and brightly colored tights, a heap of battered ballet shoes. The last dance, friend. When he turned around to look once more at the victim there was the sudden gaudy flash of a camera and McLaren, the photographer, was moving around the dead man’s bed with all the agility of someone shooting high-fashion models. You put a little too much enthusiasm into your work, he thought, a little too much spirit. It was almost as if McLaren found joy in the act of photographing murder victims. Nightingale had the suspicion that if he were left to his own devices, McLaren would rearrange such things as the position of the victim’s limbs, his clothing, his surroundings, just to add some fine artistic touch of his own.

  “You through yet, McLaren?” he asked.

  “Just about.”

  Pop. Flash. The click of a shutter. And Henry Falcon is immortalized from yet another angle. Nightingale moved to the dresser beside the bed. Baubles. Some jewelry. A flimsy little notebook covered in brown velvet; Nightingale flipped it open. It was a diary of sorts, not the kind that detailed the mundane daily comings and goings of a life—had lunch with M and ate two veal chops—instead it was mainly concerned with Henry Falcon’s inner existence. Nightingale read a few pages. Sorry stuff. Sometimes I wonder now if all human relationships are doomed. If not by the intransigencies of the soul nor the fickle qualities of the heart, then surely by death itself. Laden with a sense of doom. Maybe this guy Carlos had worked his icy hand across old Henry’s life someplace in the past. I have asked myself how long one might be destined to haul around the same emotional cargo, then I imagine it has to be forever because certain emotions are as certain, as persistent, as genes. Nightingale closed the book and put it back down.

  McLaren said, “Spicy stuff, lieutenant?”

  “Yeah. It would keep you awake all night long, McLaren. Hard-on guaranteed.”

  “You don’t say.” McLaren took another of his ghastly photographs; he was practically straddling the corpse now. “I worked some of these fag murders before. Always the same damn motive deep down. Jealousy, lieutenant.”

  Nightingale sighed. At the window he paused and drew up the blind. Jealousy, he thought. How could sad little Henry Falcon have inspired jealousy in someone’s heart? He turned his face to the bed; the facial skin was discolored, the eyes staring with the kind of glaze that suggested a glandular malfunction, the thin white legs had all the substance of toothpicks. The naked genitalia were withered, the balls hanging like two dehydrated apricots. A pair of green tights had been used to strangle Henry Falcon; they had been knotted very tightly around his throat.

  “I figure that’s plenty,” McLaren said, starting to pack his camera away.

  Nightingale watched the photographer go, then gazed around the bedroom. A solitary life—why did it all suggest such loneliness? The scribblings in the notebook, the ancient ballet shoes in the closet, the heavy makeup on the dead man’s face: They indicated a life in which your own only companionship was what you saw in the mirror when you tried to practice your dance steps. He glanced one last time at Henry Falcon, then went inside the front room, where Moody was prowling around.

  “Some of these prints must be pretty rare,” Moody said. “Mademoiselle Taglioni in La Sylphide. Saturday, July 28, 1832, Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. I guess that must be worth a few bucks, Frank.”

  Nightingale looked at the prints and posters. Dancers, nothing but dancers. Pavlova. Karsavina. Nijinsky. Carlotta Zambelli. On the opposite wall, placed against the mirrors, were dance barres made out of old polished wood. Nightingale thought: You can easily imagine the old guy standing in this room, makeup smeared on, tights pulled over thin legs, paunch hanging out; you can imagine the breakdown of his body and what must have been a wrenching longing for a past shadow of himself.

  “And here’s one of Henry Falcon himself,” Moody said. “Romeo and Juliet. Stockholm. April, 1937.”

  Nightingale looked at the poster. The
re was a photograph of the young Henry Falcon dressed for the role of Romeo. It was impossible to relate the face of the young man—handsome, slightly effeminate, deep shadows under the mournful eyes—with the old ruin that lay in the bedroom. Poor Romeo, he thought.

  “Well, if the posters are valuable and there’s some jewelry just lying around in the bedroom, then we’re not looking at robbery, are we?”

  Moody was silent for a while, then said, “I talked with Mrs. Delahanty. The woman who found the body.”

  “How come she found it at this time of day?”

  “Falcon paid her a few bucks a week to clean up for him. And he always insisted she get an early start so she’d wake him up. He liked to exercise. I guess he wanted to get up in the dark and put himself through his paces, Frank. Anyhow, Mrs. Delahanty—whose main ambition in life is to save enough money for a ticket back to Belfast because America is going to the dogs—”

  “She’s going to be safe in Belfast?”

  “I guess. Whatever. She says he never had any company. He lived all alone. Your regular recluse. She’d known him for years and in all that time she never saw anybody in this apartment except for old Henry. Take it from there, Frank—what are we dealing with? What are we looking at here?”

  “Maybe he went out and picked somebody up off the street, Doug. A stranger. They make an assignation—”

  “There’s a quaint expression.”

  Nightingale paused. He stared at a slick of yogurt that hung just under Moody’s lower lip. I won’t tell him about it, he thought. I’ll let it stick there all day long and he won’t know why people are looking at him in a funny way. “Like I was saying, Doug. They come to terms. Sexual favors. An old guy like Henry Falcon would have to pay, yeah? Only he picks up a killer. And, like Camilla Darugna, he gets strangled.”

  “Another strangulation,” Moody said, looking suddenly thoughtful.

  Don’t tell me anything about the intimacy of murder, Nightingale thought. Don’t talk about the absence of distancing to me, please. He rubbed his hands together, caught a glimpse of himself sideways in the mirror, then turned his face away. Your overcoat could house Barnum & Bailey. Some kind of Ringling Brothers extravaganza. You need the rubber room, the steam bath, somebody with deft fingers to knead your flabby muscles.

  “Maybe we’re dealing with some random killing here, Doug, and I don’t know anything more difficult than that. The guy he picks up hates gays, doesn’t want to be one himself; he really has it in for old Henry.”

  “Might be,” Moody said.

  “Well, there’s no sign of forced entry, is there? He lets the killer come in. Puts out the old welcome mat. There’s some sexual foreplay in the bedroom, then wham. Old Henry shuffles off these mortal coils.”

  Moody smiled slightly. He rubbed his chin a second but missed the spot of yogurt. “You notice the pictures in the bedroom?”

  “I could hardly miss them,” Nightingale said.

  “A shrine, a shrine to a lost love. I could see Henry Falcon sitting in the dark, maybe lighting a few candles while his heart is just withering away over his old love Carlos. You think maybe this Carlos character just somehow strayed back into Henry’s life and offed him?” Moody looked glumly at the posters. “It’s possible.”

  “Why, Doug? Why would somebody just come right out of the past and kill like that? You’d need a grudge as long as the interstate.”

  Moody shrugged. “Two strangulations in as many days. It makes you think.”

  “Think what? No, don’t tell me—”

  “Our old pal William Chapman.”

  “Come on, Doug.”

  “Seriously. Why not? Maybe Billy Chapman’s lost it. Maybe he’s suddenly missing a couple of aces in his deck—all kinds of people just go off on weird killing sprees out of the blue yonder, Frank. It happens. Why couldn’t it have been Chapman? Maybe we’ve got a robbery here after all. I mean, how the hell do we know there’s nothing missing? Old Henry might have had a fortune stuffed under his mattress, right? Billy Chapman could have been enticed up here, seized his opportunity, done away with Falcon.”

  Moody paused, shrugged, then went restlessly across the room to an old-fashioned mahogany sideboard. Nightingale watched him: a drawer man, always the first one to rummage among the possessions of the deceased. Hunched over an open drawer, sifting things eagerly, he reminded Nightingale of one of those Hollywood scientists in filmed biographies of the thirties and forties—Pasteur crouched over a bunsen burner, Fleming hunting down the truth about penicillin. Nightingale had never felt very comfortable about the drawer bit; it had always made him feel he was plundering something intensely private. He moved away from the barre and went slowly to the window. Billy Chapman, he thought. The trouble is, Moody seems obsessed with his big rookie failure. He seems to want Billy Chapman to have killed Henry Falcon. The open sore of an old disappointment. An old item of hurt pride. It could easily just stick in your head and stay there with all the force of a conviction. So the Boy Wonder hadn’t forgotten, and now the signs of Billy Chapman’s vicious handiwork were to be seen everywhere.

  Nightingale looked down into the street once more, pretending he didn’t see anybody milling around the cop cars. He shut his eyes. It would be a wonderful life if you could find Chapman’s prints beautifully inlaid upon some dusty shelf, if you could somehow find evidence that would tell you that you were looking for one killer and not two. A simple solution. One manhunt, not two.

  “Zucchini with orange sauce,” Moody said.

  “Say it again.”

  “A recipe in this drawer.”

  “It sounds disgusting.”

  Moody rummaged around again. “Ah-hah. Henry’s passport.” He held it in the air a moment, then flicked through the pages. He laughed briefly.

  “What’s so funny?” Nightingale asked.

  “It seems our Henry wasn’t born with the name Falcon. It would appear the macho name of Falcon was something he invented for stage purposes.” Moody laughed again.

  “What was his real name?”

  “You sure you want to hear this, Frank?”

  “I’m grown up, I can take most things.”

  “He was christened Dick Bird.”

  “Dick what?”

  “Dick Bird.” Moody covered his mouth with his hand to restrain himself from laughing any further. There was a quiet snickering noise. Nightingale reached over and took the passport from the Boy Wonder’s hands.

  “I wonder if he was called Dicky,” Moody said.

  “You going to start making bird jokes, Doug? Huh?”

  Moody shook his head and tried to look solemn. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Frank, would I?”

  “I’m up to here with bird jokes. I know every goddamn bird pun that was ever invented. They make me puke.” Nightingale read the name in the passport, looked at the photograph and wondered how Falcon/Bird had ever managed to clear immigration in any country in the world. The face in the photograph might have been that of a fifteen-year-old kid. Dicky Bird, for Christ’s sake. He snapped the passport shut and handed it back to Moody. “You make one bird joke, friend, and I’ll tell you about the yogurt you got stuck to your chin, okay?”

  “What yogurt?”

  “Look for yourself.” Nightingale wandered back inside the bedroom, where he stood looking down at the twisted shape of Henry Falcon. He sat at the bottom of the mattress, took in the pictures of Carlos, the jewelry on the dresser, then the corpse once more. Somebody kills this harmless old queen. Somebody comes in here with Henry and strangles the life out of him with his own green tights. A man deserves something in death, he thought. A little respect. Something. He doesn’t deserve to lie here in all his sexual antiquity and look as ludicrous as this, does he?

  He stood up and went to the dresser, picked up the little notebook, flicked the pages. A journey into despair, a voyage into sorrow. It was all here, all the sad broken ruminations of Henry’s life. Little phrases of poetry, references to Carlos
. He turned the pages. The last few were different: They didn’t mention Carlos and they didn’t speculate about the misery of human relationships. They were more immediate, more specific, mysterious in their fashion. He only looks a little like Carlos. I deceive myself this way. Some days, when he comes down the street, I imagine I see Carlos in the stride, the swagger of his walk, but I realize I’m only replaying an old movie inside my head. He only looks like Carlos. Besides, Carlos was so long ago.… This is a different man, another man. On a good day, he looks up and waves.

  Nightingale closed the notebook.

  Some days, when he comes down the street …

  When who comes down the goddamn street? The killer?

  He moved to the door of the bedroom and called out, “Hey, Doug. Come in here and look at this.”

  2.

  I really get off on the idea of finding you and killing you because the real kicker is I can apologize for murdering you in advance.…

  Madeleine went inside a Chock Full o’ Nuts and sat at the counter, ordered a coffee, glanced at her watch. 8:04. She felt sleepy, rubbed her eyes, stared at the headline of the newspaper spread out in front of her. It was another bad day in the Middle East—when was it not? She turned the pages, searching for local news, searching not for the meaningless statements of politicians or which linebacker was a cocaine addict or whether a certain Nazi out on Long Island was going to survive deportation hearings—searching, she realized, for a murder. A killing connected with the message that had come over Harry’s answering machine. She flicked the pages. A charred body had been found inside an old church in the South Bronx. A decomposed figure of uncertain sex had been fished out of the East River. There had been a gunfight in Harlem. Nothing to link anything with the voice on the Apology line. She sipped her coffee, glanced across the smoke-filled restaurant, looked once again at her watch. I really get off on the idea of finding you and killing you. She finished her coffee and slid down from the stool after leaving some coins beside her saucer. She went outside, paused on the street corner, stared at the way a red STOP signal shimmered in the weak rain of early morning. That voice, she thought. That creep out there. She clenched her hands tightly and crossed the street. Harry had been able to make her forget the voice last night; he’d been able to soothe her. The night had finally been restful and dreamless and her sleep easy—but today, today in the thin light of morning, she felt the same uneasiness come back to her. He uses the Apology line to let off steam, Maddy.